IF Comp '08 Review - Horatio No Last Name's A Martian Odyssey!
True confessions time: I am only willing to go so deep into science-fiction territory. Or rather, I separate science fiction into two categories, one of which I like, one of which doesn’t understand binary I have no patience for. The first kind uses the freedom you get from making up your own worlds with their own rules as a means of exploring ideas or commenting on society, that sort of thing, you know, like Fahrenheit 451 and that one Star Trek episode with the half-white half-black people and like that.
The second kind is the one that actually cares how the warp drive is assembled. I do not care whatsoever how the warp drive is assembled. If I were captain of a spaceship I would piss the mechanic off by calling it the goes-really-fast-thinger. “Chuckles,” I would say, “make the goes-really-fast-thinger do lemonty-twelve, please, ‘cause we gotta get out of here, ‘cause we’re all kinds of being shot at,” and oh, sure, he would roll his eyes a lot, but, I mean, I’d be the captain.
I get the feeling that this game is going to fall squarely into the second category, which terrifies me, but let’s fire it up and find out.
[WARNING WARNING spoilers now entering sub-etha void zone! ALERT THE DROIDS]
I went to Mars with a guy named Putz?
Um. Huh. I am flying around looking at different parts of Mars, none of which look like much at all. Nothing seems examinable… oh, good, I’m crashing. Hopefully that’ll start the game proper.
> x chair
The pilot’s chair, complete with adjustable straps.You rub the injured member ruefully.
There are so many jokes I could make right now that I am suffering paralysis of choice.
[** Programming error: Crash site (object number) 163337 has no property distance to read **]
Okay. People. Test your damn games. Even if you don’t have testers, you should at least go through them yours- you should get some testers.
Atmospheric composition: 95% CO2, 2.7% N, 1.6% Ar, 0.13% O2
Please please please let this information be flavor and not part of any puzzle more complicated than “don’t take your helmet off.”
> put tank in thermoskin
Your arms are busy holding the hydrogen tank.
I know that. That’s why I wanted to put it in the thermoskin.
>hint
Think harder. :)
Oh dude you are lucky that emoticon is there. Otherwise, pow.
As you step into the canal, the green lawn surrounding you moves out of the way!
Yikes!
It’s too dark to wonder around.
If you ask your friends what they want for Christmas, and they say “All I want for Christmas is an example of why automatic spell-checkers are not by themselves sufficient proofreaders,” then consider this sentence Horatio’s Christmas present to them. Also, you have some weird damn friends.
Oh no, shenanigans?
Mars is weird.
Huh. It looks like you can render the game unwinnable by forgetting to take your sleeping bag with you. Which, naturally, I did.
Pygmy bricks?
The Martian points at them and says “rock”.
They are pretty bitchin’ pyramids, yeah.
> take brick
That’s hardly portable.
Really?
I do not understand this game at all.
Okay, the writing is not great, but there is a certain B-movieness to the word choices that I am digging on. “Crack-brained trees” and “black corruption spurts from its injury” and “cussing the fellows” and, yes, “shenanigans.” The whole game has a sort of watered-down Captain Spaceman Beyond the Mountains of the Moon thing going on, which I wish had been cranked up to giant pulse mode.
The creature has no head, just body and members and a row of eyes completely around it. The top end of the body is a diaphragm stretched as tight as a drumhead.
Okay, useful tip for life: if you are not using the word “member” as in “Frank was a member of the Future Farmers of America,” it means “penis.” I don’t care what you in your charming innocence think it means, it means “penis,” and it means it in a remarkably silly way. The word “diaphragm” also has a potential sexual connotation that people’s brains are going to jump to immediately if you go around saying things like “member.” Thank you.
Debbie’s lips closed around his member, and she released the swarm.
That is not from the game; that is my Lyttle Lytton entry this year. It just seemed like a good time to whip it out.
You can see a barrel being here. […] In and out dart the barrel-people.
Wha?!
I forget who it was who, in their review of David Lynch’s Dune movie, said you couldn’t really watch it; you just had to let it sort of wash over you, and then it was all right. I am starting to think that may apply to this game.
Oh, hey, is there music in this game? I didn’t have my headphones on. This is rather nice music. Very fitting. Very running-around-with-strange-bird-things-over-mobile-grass-while-mysterious-glass-spheres-drift-by. Makes me miss my Ray Lynch CDs from back when I believed in crystals.
I am not sure how to score this one. It’s weird. It’s very weird. That is not necessarily something I want to dock games points for, though. I guess the issue was that it was lacking accessibility, even if there had been more to it… y’know, that seems to be a theme of this year’s entries, not having much to them. I know these are two-hour games, but that doesn’t mean they have to be barren wastelands with one examinable object per room. Maybe people thought they only had two hours to write them. I don’t know. Gets a four, mainly because I liked the music.
1 year ago